Bent Play Quotes

“The secret island had looked mysterious enough on the night they had seen it before - but now, swimming in the hot June haze, it seemed more enchanting than ever. As they drew near to it, and saw the willow trees that bent over the water-edge and heard the sharp call of moorhens that scuttled off, the children gazed in delight. Nothing but trees and birds and little wild animals. Oh, what a secret island, all for their very own, to live on and play on.”

— Enid Blyton

“These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it.”

— Michael Brooks

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

— David Hume

“About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror.
Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura.”

— Irving Howe

“With his mind full of the engaging Rosalind, he stared at Mac. "Hi, sorry to interrupt." He lurched to his feet, scattered his papers so some sailed to the floor. "Ah, it's all right. No problem. I was just ... " He bent to retrieve papers as she did the same, and knocked his head against hers. "Sorry, sorry." He stayed down, met her eyes. "Crap." She smiled, and the dimples came out to play. "Hello, Carter.”

— Nora Roberts

“Vampires are fond of their games. But the games that They play are different than the variants that I'm familiar with. The rules were made to be bent, broken, shattered-and somebody always gets hurt.
Always.”

— Nenia Campbell

“But failure and success are labels placed upon people's lives the way a child values winning a game whether or not they have to bend the rules in order to do it. But life is not a game and the rules cannot be bent without repercussions that prove damaging later on. We must play the game for all we are worth, and we must play it fairly. We play and lose and play again, over and over. We lose and we pick up and start again a little wiser. We learn the game a little better in the playing, learn lessons for the next game. And should we lose today it is only a step towards the winning of the larger game. We move our piece on the board one step at a time, but it is all part of some larger process.”

— James Rozoff

“The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the play things of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. After having exhausted all the different modes of election without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they notice did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body.”

— Alexis De Tocqueville

“Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged ... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.”

— Martin Amis

“The jazz chord substitutions in a country song ... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.”

— Brian Setzer

“It's easier to play a dim character, for me, because I have a natural bent for comedy. It's not intrinsic for me to be crafty, so I would have to go outside for a source of origin. I think of myself as pretty dim.”

— Stephen Root

“Theatre outings are my favourite thing to spend money on. The most influential play I saw was 'Bent,' which starred Ian McKellen. And I loved the original performance of 'The Rocky Horror Show,' with Richard O'Brien and Tim Curry at the Royal Court, when I was about 15.”

— Dawn French

“I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.”

— Diane Setterfield

“After supper was over and the toasts had been drunk, the boy Pablo was called in to play for the company while the gentlemen smoked ... there was softness and languor in the wire strings
but there was also a kind of madness; the recklessness, the call of wild countries which all these men had felt or followed in one way or another. Through clouds of cigar smoke, the scout and the soldiers, the Mexican rancheros and the priests, sat silently watching the bent head and crouching shoulders of the banjo player, and his seesawing yellow hand, which sometimes lost all form and became a mere whirl of matter in motion, like a patch of sand-storm.”

— Willa Cather

“Girls fantasize about being tied up and bent over a broad pair of knees. Girls dream of being dominated and worshipped. Girls adore dressing up, role play, changing roles. Yes, that's right, perfidious submissives are itchy to switch to the Domme and grab the whip handle.”

— Chloe Thurlow

“So what part did I play in all this? Well, none really. They completely ignored me for the whole twenty or thirty minutes. Which was perfectly fine, of course, I didn't mind. But it did puzzle me, because early every morning they would come yelping and scratching around the doors and windows of my house until I got up and took them for their walk. If anything disturbed the daily ritual, like I had to drive into town, or have a meeting, or fly to England or something, they would get thoroughly miserable and simply not know what to do. Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn't just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can't ignore someone who isn't there, because that's not what "ignore" means.”

— Douglas Adams

“I don't get it: they re-package the same shitty football games every year, update a few stats, call it a new game and millions of suckers keep buying them. What's the point? Why not just go outside and play real football instead? Or even better yet, get bent. Nobody likes football.”

— Maddox

“Delacroix , Wagner , Baudelaire all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject man's nervous and psychic being.”

— Charles Baudelaire

“A few weeks after my surgery, I went out to play catch with my golden retriever. When I bent over to pick up the ball, my prosthesis fell out. The dog snatched it, and I found myself chasing him down the road yelling "Hey, come back here with my breast!"”

— Linda Ellerbee

“A silly comedy needs a straight guy, and that guy needs to be as straight as possible. The moment you start playing straight you're not straight anymore, you're bent straight, so it really requires the usual serious, straight-forward analysis and research, looking into it and finding the dramatic function, all of what you do until you feel you've collected enough points to safely and securely play the part.”

— Christoph Waltz